Think about the number of people you know who wear glasses: your parents’ reading glasses, your sibling who needs glasses to drive, that friend whose face you simply can’t imagine without glasses. Now think about the people in your life with color blindness, dyslexia, limited motor function, and attention disorders that make it difficult to focus on large blocks of text.
The variety is hardly surprising, given that the United Nations estimates that one billion people are currently living with some form of disability. Different access needs are part of everyday life for all of us - so why isn’t software built for everyone?
The short answer is that accessibility checks are labor intensive, expensive, and difficult to integrate into shortening DevOps production cycles. Though more organizations are being pushed to consider those with different access needs by legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act and a rising number of lawsuits, accessibility checks lag behind weekly or daily code releases.
Source: The International Standard for Web Accessibility & Inclusive Design, 3PlayMedia
Compounding the issue is that no one owns accessibility in the software development lifecycle. Those most concerned with ADA compliance - like legal teams - are often located outside the product and engineering organization entirely. Embedding their expertise into development pipelines without slowing production schedules is nearly impossible.
Enter quality engineering, the practice of embedding testing throughout the development lifecycle to deliver positive user experiences that build customer loyalty and improve customer acquisition. QE helps software testing and QA teams expand the definition of quality to match the full user experience through high-impact, scalable test automation and targeted manual testing. With the right solutions, QA teams can harness their product expertise and embrace their role as customer advocates to integrate automated accessibility checks into their organization’s DevOps practice without slowing down release schedules.
This guide will help quality teams understand how automated accessibility checks can be embedded into development pipelines, how to build collaborative accessibility workflows, discover how a real-world quality engineering team made their platform more accessible, and come away with actionable tips for making their own apps and websites better for everyone.